Transvestia

thousands of hours of chemical laboratory manipu- lations, replacing her sore right hand, order came rapidly out of the chaos, and presently she was en- joying the first decent breakfast she had had since leaving home. It was not, she pointed out with a flash picture of her hands assembling hundreds of tiny tran- sisters into modules, any lack of dexterity; cooking was simply hateful to her. So it was in a relaxed mood that they retired to an armchair, to smoke a cigarette and look each other over mentally.

The contrast between his tangled, disorderly jumble of facts, fancie experiences and knowledge versus her tidy assembly of her life on; it seemed, neat display racks, was striking. Each defended his or her system briefly; he with the record of achieving several useful inventions by the random association of apparently unrelated data, and she with her obvious ability to call up instantly anything she had in stock. Then to personal history, her name, he finally learned, was Maria Stahl, but she danced as "Ivory Carter". At this she laughed, thought "Ink" and glanced across the room to where a drawing board stood, starkly functional amid the rather frilly atmosphere of her apartment. The frills, he realized, represented what she thought she ought to like, but her real interest was shown by the fact that her pseudonym came right off the labels of the bottles of drafting ink! Her age was the same as his own, 25; both were the products of good middle-class homes. A million details passed back and forth in a relaxed sort of way, and then she transfixed him into quivering panic with one word, "'Sex?"

It was as if he stood, an unarmed and helpless guard, before the darkest closet of his being. He also felt briefly like the picture of "September Morn", futilly trying to hide three secret spots with only two

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